Read Your Way Through Mexico City

Describing Mexico to the rhythm of a highway has always been a literary temptation. When former President Donald J. Trump declared that Mexicans were a threat to the United States, the American writer Paul Theroux — the dean of travel writing — decided to meet his alleged enemy. Having spent a lifetime boarding trains around the globe, Theroux crisscrossed Mexico by car until he reached the Zapatistas in Chiapas. The result, “On the Plain of Snakes,” is a brilliant travelogue.

What books capture current Mexico?

Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season” deals with the violence that has devastated Mexico, leaving us with a death toll akin to that of a civil war. According to Reporters Without Borders, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world in which to be a journalist. Melchor shows that the most terrible news can only be delivered in a novel.

Valeria Luiselli reconstructs the microcosm of a working-class neighborhood in “The Story of My Teeth.” Originally written to accompany an exhibit in an urban art gallery, the novel traces the map of a deteriorated suburb and reinvents it through its imaginary inhabitants.

In the second half of the 20th century, Carlos Monsiváis operated as a nonstop chronicler, a one-man press agency covering all the layers of reality. “Mexican Postcards” is a collection of his best work. One of his obsessions was trying to understand the irresistible magnetism of Mexico City; its pollution and danger do little to prevent people from being drawn to a place so full of energy. A Monsiváis aphorism sums up the passion of belonging to this urban labyrinth: “The worst nightmare is the one that excludes us.”

It was in that spirit that I wrote “Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico.” The product of 25 years of writing, the book attempts to recreate a city that, despite its apparent dehumanization, remains a cherished place in which to live. On the last page I write, “You belong to the place where you pick up the trash.” It’s easy to be proud of a city’s palaces and glories: The true test of belonging is being willing to deal with its waste.

It is no accident that the truest face of a chilango — an inhabitant of Mexico City — appears in the wake of disaster. After the earthquakes of 1985 and 2017, Mexico City residents became a rescue team, proving that the rubble and ruins were ours. In “Nothing, Nobody,” Elena Poniatowska collects the testimonies of those who lived through the…